ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 we touched briefly on the notion of presupposition: the information in one sentence, for example, Andy Murfee usually drives his Datsun to work, presupposes the existence of a referent, Andy Murfee, and certain predications, the facts that he works, owns a Datsun, and knows how to drive it. The present chapter explores the notion of presupposition further, considering the notions of existence, possession and occurrence. One means of conveying such presuppositions is the factive predicate, the topic of Section 11.1. Other predicates imply, rather than presuppose, the truth of some proposition; they are studied in Section 11.2. Sentences often contain information about the necessity, possibility or probability of one or another proposition. This kind of information is called modality, the topic of Section 11.3.
